Working for peace
...“beginning from within”by your
WebWeaver, Doug King
This was first published in the
Spring 2007 issue of Network
News, pages 3-4.
I would welcome your comments.
Just send a
note
Commenting on this essay, Gordon
Shull of Wooster, Ohio, sent this note:
I liked your comments, Doug - they reminded me of
a comment by E. Stanley Jones, who was given to neat
aphorisms:
"Religion that doesn't begin with the
individual, doesn't' begin. Religion that ends with
the individual, ends."
I don't remember where he wrote that, but the
words themselves are not easy to forget!
-Gordon Shull
[8-10-07] |
A few weeks ago I deeply enjoyed a
five-day retreat at a Trappist monastery near Atlanta. Five days
with a dozen men on retreat, 10 of them Presbyterian ministers. Five
days mostly in silence, except for the times of worship (beginning
at 4:00 am) and times of work alongside the monks (including picking
up trash along the road outside the monastery, and cleaning the
nursery where the monks grow bonsai trees to sell). It was a good
time.
I realized how much the silence meant when, riding back to Atlanta
with three others, we very soon engaged in the same tired arguments:
“Our church is losing members because we’re compromising with the
culture.” “But we need to be faithful to Jesus’ love for all
people.” “But we can’t let these differences split our church.” I
began thinking a rule of silence for Presbyterian clergy might not
be a bad thing.
But I returned home ready to say something for this issue of
Network News. Our Witherspoon board meeting in San Jose a few
weeks ago decided that this issue should focus on something we have
not dealt with recently, but that still demands attention – and
action: the war in Iraq. We’ve gathered a number of pieces on the
subject that we hope you’ll find helpful, but I’d like to look at
the issue of war from a slightly different angle.
To quote a line from one of the hippy types during the activist ’60s
(was it Timothy Leary?), we might revise the old line “Don’t just
stand there, do something!” – “Don’t just do something; stand
there.”
I wandered into this line of thought from one of the books I was
reading at the monastery, A Path with Heart, by Jack
Kornfield. He writes as a teacher of Buddhist meditation, to
introduce that practice to people with little background in
meditation. He calls his second chapter “Stopping the War,” by which
he means the war that rages within each of us. He quotes his
teacher, Achaan Chah, as describing that inner battle thus:
We human beings are constantly in
combat, at war to escape the fact of being so limited, limited
by so many circumstances we cannot control. But instead of
escaping, we continue to create suffering, waging war with good,
waging war with evil, waging war with what is too small, waging
war with what is too big, waging war with what is too short or
too long, or right or wrong, courageously carrying on the
battle.1
Because we cannot accept the
realities of life, including our insecurity and pain and loss and
death, we are constantly struggling to protect ourselves from them,
and we must defend ourselves against them – and the people who
confront us with them daily – as our enemies.
This insight came to me in a fresh way, perhaps because it came
through a Buddhist way of inhabiting the world. But it is nothing
really new to those of us who are grounded in the Christian
tradition. Paul certainly was painfully aware of this war, as he
wrote in Romans 7:21-24:
So I find it to be a law that
when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.For I
delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my
members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me
captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched
man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
But what does all this have to do
with America’s current adventures in Iraq and elsewhere? Two things,
I think:
First, this reminds us that the roots of this war (and maybe of all
wars) are spiritual. We are in this war because of fear of those who
are different from us, fear of being attacked and hurt again, fear
of a world that is so different from the one we thought we knew. And
it appears that those on the other side of the conflict, militant
Muslims, are motivated by the same kinds of fears.
Our leaders, as well as the leaders
on the other side, have exploited those fears brilliantly for their
own purposes, perhaps to consolidate and expand their power, to
enrich themselves and their friends, to make a name for themselves
as defenders of democracy or freedom or Islamic purity or ... you
can fill in whatever else should go in this long, long list.
We cannot work effectively against
our nation’s culture of violence unless we understand the deep
spiritual sources from which it draws its power.
But also we need to draw on the deep
springs of peace to rein in the wars within ourselves, and to find
the strength for the long, long struggle to transform our culture
into one of peace, shalom, for all. Until we confront the deep
conflicts within ourselves and in our cultures and religions and
nations – what Paul called principalities and powers – we won’t move
far toward true peace.
Certainly there’s a danger that such
a focus might lead us to withdraw from the hard struggles in the
political arena, but many great campaigners for peace have known
they had to start there. Mahatma Gandhi once said:
I have only three enemies. My
favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better,
is the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, is
far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man
named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little
influence.2
If the Witherspoon Society has a
fault, it may be that we tend to emphasize head and hands over heart
in our life as an organization, and many of us may do the same as
individuals. We are deeply committed to study and reflection, and to
action, but we may neglect the spiritual and emotional depths of our
own lives. A number of people – from both left and right – have
commented on one of the weaknesses of the Rev. Jerry Falwell as his
subordinating his evangelical faith community to the political right
wing in this country. I wonder whether we do the same thing, and so
undermine our own witness for peace and justice, both in our
Presbyterian Church and in our society as a whole.
So here’s an invitation to all you Witherspooners: Let’s talk about
the spiritual roots of this war, and let’s deal with the spiritual
wars within each of us, and experiment with ways to move toward
peace, to use a title of a great book written during World War II by
the Quaker scholar Douglas Steere, by “beginning from within.”
3
Let's restore to our lives, and even to the life of our church, the
kind of balance that the 4H clubs seek, among head, heart and hands
– and so take some steps toward the fourth “H” of health, which our
Biblical traditional teaches us is really health for persons, for
communities, for nations and the world: shalom.
NOTES
1. Jack
Kornfield, A Path With Heart: A Guide through the Perils and
Promises of Spiritual Life (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 23.
2.
Quoted by Jack Kornfield, op. cit., p. 25.
3. Douglas V. Steere, On
Beginning from Within (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943).
